My father loved to quote lines from the poetry he had learned …

It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of how much music, singing and poetry there was in my childhood. My father loved to quote lines from the poetry he had learned to recite at school, particularly Longfellow, Yeats and Shakespeare. My mother taught me to recite poetry, and gave me my first book of poems when I was five, The Book of A Thousand Poems. We grew up listening to the anaphora, rhythms, language and imagery of the King James Bible and the Book of Psalms. We sang Protestant hymns, lots of Percy French and the traditional songs and ballads we learned in primary school. The Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and musicals like Oklahoma, The White Horse Inn, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers were among my parent’s record collection. In secondary school I read Yeats, Kavanagh, Dickinson, Frost and Shakespeare, while Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joan Armatrading and Queen formed the soundtrack to my teens…

My mother tells the story of how she left me with my grandmother for a week, and when she came to take me home I had learned to read. My primary school teacher had a little library in her classroom, and I borrowed a different book every day to take home to read to my mother while she was doing housework. My mother tells another story of how, as a child, I sat on a chair in the kitchen totally absorbed in my book, while she and my father and older brothers were sweeping a flash flood out the backdoor. As I remember it, I had received a package of new books that day from my teacher aunt in Australia, and the excitement of opening those new books was like the rush of water through the house. Being given permission in my teens to cycle the five miles to Roscommon town library on a Saturday afternoon was a marvellous liberation…

As a child I used to dream of writing a book, any book, but as a teenager I lost confidence in my writing. I got the opportunity to study in Canada for two years, and because of an inspiring English teacher there, I went on to then study literature and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. I was inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and after travelling in India and South America, I returned to Dublin to work in community development and adult education. In my 30s, while training as a psychoanalyst, I found myself reading more and more poetry. Psychoanalysis is akin to poetry in its concern for the words we use, how we use them and their multiple meanings and associations. The child and adult analyst Donald Winnicott wrote about children’s ‘serious play,’ an apt description of our work as poets.

I attended my first creative writing class in my early 40s. Though initially interested in writing short stories, a requirement to write four poems ignited a powerful passion that changed my life. I joined a writing group, attended courses and set up a poetry reading group, and a workshop group with my friend, the poet Shirley McClure. A few years later I did an MPhil in Writing with the University of South Wales, where my tutor was the wonderful poet Gillian Clarke. In the meantime I was sending out poems to competitions and literary journals, and beginning to give readings. I was encouraged by the positive response to my work, but one of the most valuable pieces of advice I was given on the MPhil was not to rush my first collection. The River was published when I was 54, ten years after I wrote my first poem…

I try to let myself be as free as possible in the first draft so that I can catch the energy of that initial inspiration, like running along the platform to catch a train that is just about to leave the station. When I begin to redraft, I work with the questions of where to start and where to stop and what form the poem will take. I read the poem aloud over and over to hear the music as I take out or put in words, work with the imagery, change the lineation. Editing is an unconscious process as well as consciously drawing on skill and craft. Over time we develop a kind of sixth sense for what is working or not, and we find ourselves applying that to our work as we are redrafting.

Usually a poem goes through many drafts before I have a sense that it is ready. I have a group of poet friends who give me invaluable feedback. I’ve learned that it’s wise to put a new poem away for a few months and then look at it again, though often in the excitement of completing a poem I want to send it out immediately. Time away from the poem helps us separate from it and therefore gives us perspective so that we can better see what the poem needs. It’s exciting to come back to a poem and find that I see it differently, and therefore can work with it more freely than I could have months or years before. That’s when I might make the first line the title of the poem, or begin at the second stanza, or leave out the ending I have crafted so carefully. Mimi Khalvati says that the mind instinctively makes connections and that includes the reader’s mind. She suggests we can be bolder and wilder than we think.

Jane Clarke – Interviewed by THE POET

Desire scripted by violence.

Nay, then I’ll stop your mouth

                        Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

Language is the first site of loss and our first defense against it. Which is why after Philomela’s brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes her, he cuts out her tongue and tosses it, the bloody stump hissing at the girl’s feet.

*

In my poem “Philomela,” I leave out this mutilation. Leave out, too, Philomela’s sister, Procne, who learns of her sister’s rape from the tapestry Philomela weaves. Leave out the death of Itylus, Procne and Tereus’ son, whom the sisters dismember, boil, and serve to Tereus for punishment; Philomela tossing the boy’s bloody head-stump at his father. Not the metamorphosis of Philomela and Procne into a nightingale and swallow respectively, Tereus into the hoopoe that pursues them. Such details would be unimaginable, I think, not because a reader can’t imagine them, but because I don’t want to.

*

Ovid makes his trio’s transformation occur at the instant syntax shifts from the conditional to the imperfect. “The girls went flying…/ as if they were on wings. They were on wings!” he writes. The difference between simile and metaphor. The second the mouth conceives it, the imagination turns it into the real.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 669-670.

[…]

Rape threads through The Metamorphoses. To Ovid, a poet, perhaps the ultimate dehumanizing act would bring the body to a place beyond language.  People in his myths often become animals, men and women “more cut off from words than a seal,” as Robert Lowell writes of one manic stint spent in McLean*. Language is power. Language is masculine. To live cut off from words is to descend into the bodily, the irrational. It is, if words make law and government, to be outside political power. To make his (literate, male) audience understand such powerlessness, Ovid frames the rape from Philomela’s point of view. He centres male agency within a (limited) female consciousness.

*Robert Lowell, Waking in the Blue

Or Ovid features rape because it is a trope of Roman elegiac discourse. Arma, amor, ira. Desire is scripted by violence.

Paisley Rekdal – Nightingale: a gloss

to heal oneself

The visionary poet heals not only himself but also his readers, indeed his entire ‘tribe’, because he speaks for what is neglected or forbidden in his culture and his society.  The purpose of art, for Hughes, then, is to heal oneself and one’s tribe by uncovering the neglected, forbidden thing and, in allowing it to speak, restoring the balance between the inner and outer worlds.  Like the shaman, the poet must take an imaginative journey into the depths of the psyche in order to recover what Hughes elsewhere called the “healing energy”.  This Jungian principle that underlies Hughes’s ideas in these talks directs his readings of other poets such as Plath, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Eliot…

Andy Armitage – Prose by Ted Hughes

this insubstantial pageant

Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
These cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great earth itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on;
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare - The Tempest

purposely mislay your way in the wood

This wood is, of course, nowhere near Athens; the script is a positive maze of false leads. The wood is really located somewhere in the English midlands, possibly near Bletchley, where the great decoding machine was sited. Correction: this wood was located in the English midlands until oak, ash and thorn were chopped down to make room for a motorway a few years ago. However, since the wood existed only as a structure of the imagination, in the first place, it will remain, in the second place, as a green, decorative margin to the eternity the poet promised for himself. The English poet; his is, essentially, an English wood. It is the English wood.

The English wood is nothing like the dark, necromantic forest in which the Northern European imagination begins and ends, where its dead and the witches live, and Baba-yaga stalks about in her house with chicken’s feet looking for children in order to eat them. No. There is a qualitative, not a quantitative, difference between this wood and that forest.

The difference does not exist just because a wood contains fewer trees than a forest and covers less ground. That is just one of the causes of the difference and does not explain the effects of the difference.

For example, an English wood, however marvellous, however metamorphic, cannot, by definition, be trackless, although it might well be formidably labyrinthine. Yet there is always a way out of a maze, and, even if you cannot find it for a while, you know that it is there. A maze is a construct of the human mind, and not unlike it; lost in the wood, this analogy will always console. But to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world, to be abandoned by the light, to lose yourself utterly with no guarantee you will either find yourself or else be found, to be committed against your will – or, worse, of your own desire – to a perpetual absence; from humanity, an existential catastrophe, for the forest is as infinitely boundless as the human heart.

But the wood is finite, a closure; you purposely mislay your way in the wood, for the sake of the pleasure of roving, the temporary confusion of direction is in the nature of a holiday from which you will come home refreshed, with your pockets full of nuts, your hands full of wildflowers and the cast feather of a bird in your cap. That forest is haunted; this wood is enchanted.[…]

The English wood offers us a glimpse of a green, unfallen world a little closer to Paradise than we are.

Such is the English wood in which we see the familiar fairies, the blundering fiancés, the rude mechanicals. This is the true Shakespearian wood – but it is not the wood of Shakespeare’s time, which did not know itself to be Shakespearian, and therefore felt no need to keep up appearances. No. The wood we have just described is that of nineteenth-century nostalgia, which disinfected the wood, cleansing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it. Or, rather, denaturing, castrating these beings until they came to look just as they do in those photographs of fairy folk that so enraptured Conan Doyle. It is Mendelssohn’s wood.

“Enter these enchanted woods…” who could resist such a magical invitation?

However, as it turns out, the Victorians did not leave the woods in quite the state they might have wished to find them.

Angela Carter
Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream

appreciate only sex and blood

Where would Shakespeare have got if he had thought only of a specialized audience? What he did was to attempt to appeal on all levels, with something for the most rarefied intellectuals (who had read Montaigne) and very much more for those who could appreciate only sex and blood. I like to devise a plot that can have a moderately wide appeal. But take Eliot’s The Waste Land, very erudite, which, probably through its more popular elements and its basic rhetorical appeal, appealed to those who did not at first understand it but made themselves understand it. The poem, a terminus of Eliot’s polymathic travels, became a starting point for other people’s erudition. I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror.

Anthony Burgess
Interview Paris Review, Spring 1973

I’ve always lived in books

These days I can’t get over being old. It’s new to me, that my life like a book has to end. And because I’ve always lived in books, lines and phrases others have written stay close to me. Shakespeare’s ‘Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds’ spoke as I tried to grasp how fragile a very old marriage is.

Myra Shapiro
Afterword to The Alteration of Love

made themselves understand

Where would Shakespeare have got if he had thought only of a specialized audience? What he did was to attempt to appeal on all levels, with something for the most rarefied intellectuals (who had read Montaigne) and very much more for those who could appreciate only sex and blood. I like to devise a plot that can have a moderately wide appeal. But take Eliot’s The Waste Land, very erudite, which, probably through its more popular elements and its basic rhetorical appeal, appealed to those who did not at first understand it but made themselves understand it. The poem, a terminus of Eliot’s polymathic travels, became a starting point for other people’s erudition. I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror.

Anthony Burgess
Interview with John Cullinan in Paris Review spring 1973

Living with ghosts and sadists

23rd July

Living here with so many ghosts I feel like a caretaker of the restless dead – a protector of spirits who haunt my life – so that I’ve become my own haunted house, attempting communication with partially glimpsed movements at the edge of perception, or the sound of a creaking stair, or a noise in the attic which might only be the patter of falling rain…My ghosts can be cranky on occasion: they can whisper words, the meaning of which I’m unable to determine.

It’s been a long time since anyone treated them well –

#

So the Saturday evening play-party. With our friends from the local munch, people possessing the emotional bandwidth to comply with our safety standards, while sharing similar aesthetic tastes to ourselves.

Like a small film club, are we, eagerly awaiting the main attraction: crisps, freshly roasted nuts and popcorn are liberally distributed to ‘the audience’ in small china bowls. Missy A has been naughty and is to be disciplined while we watch. Furniture has been moved to accommodate this tableaux.

Seeing Missy A bent over a chair with her skirt hitched up is breathtaking. Hearing a hand slap against her buttocks, is so very arousing – how could it be otherwise? Savouring the slight trembling of flesh with each fresh impact. Her yelps of discomfort –

Then E rising to join T who is tiring. E has a riding crop. She takes T’s place. Her skin-head hair cut is intimidating. She uses the crop with consummate skill –

Yelps become cries. Missy’s poor glowing bum is criss-crossed with red stripes –

Missy’s now estranged husband used to take her to play-parties in the boot of their car. Almost nude, gagged and handcuffed, even in winter, she would endure this humiliation without complaint. His treatment of her became harsher and harsher, until she finally left him eighteen months ago.

It should serve as a lesson to us all, how quickly such consensual abuse can become pure abuse –

I’m reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre and his theory of emotions as ‘magic’. Because Missy has simply exchanged one sadist for another. The new man in her life allows his fantasies free rein. She is, it seems, one of life’s natural victims –

E’s skill with that crop is superlative. Her strokes are hard enough to mark Missy’s naked bum but not to break the skin. I can’t take my eyes from Missy, her tear-filled eyes, parted lips, writhing as if in the grip of some invisible power. Sex is inherently ritualistic, a symbolic act whose meanings extend beyond itself. And there can be no doubt that Missy’s submission is sexual, that she takes pleasure from E’s practiced flogging of her backside. And every face in ‘the audience’ is slightly flushed with sexual excitement as they look on. And my own arousal is equally obvious –

Finally, aftercare. Caresses, kisses, gentle stroking. A smile on Missy’s tear-stained face. She experienced some sort of climax near the end of her ‘punishment’, and all the tension is now drained from her.

I finish my popcorn (which incidentally is homemade) as E takes Missy upstairs to the bathroom to fix her make-up.

‘I hope they don’t wake the ghosts,’ I say to no one in particular.

And no one, as expected, bothers to reply.

#

Hamlet experienced an encounter with a ghost and it ended in massacre. Macbeth was confronted by Banquo’s ghost during a great banquet, and lost his peace of mind forever. It’s more than likely that Shakespeare’s ghosts are simply psychological manifestations of guilt – imagined apparitions, in other words.

But what of my ghosts?

Trish, for example?

She used to love me reading out loud to her. At bedtime I always had to read to her or she couldn’t sleep. On occasion she would perform an act of fellation upon me as I read –

She once described herself to me as ‘Terribly thin’. And her body, I must admit, was like a sabre slash in silk. As flat chested as a boy, was she. ‘You’re fine,’ I’d tell her. ‘I love you as you are.’ And then laid her back and performed cunnilingus on her for almost an hour –

I read her ‘The Story of O’ and we both got turned on by it. It was Christmas Eve I remember, and Trish guided me between her buttocks. I gently sodomized her for the first time while she masturbated herself.

We talked a lot about art, writing, music and cinema. One time I told her about André Gide, his enormous influence on the young, which sprang from his teaching that one’s only duty is to oneself, that one should never be ‘encumbered’, either by material possessions, memories or other people –

‘Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.’

And so I read ‘Isabelle’ to Trish, and we both visited le chateau de la Quartfourche with Gerard Lacase, and accompanied him on his quest for Isabelle in the grip of ‘amorous curiosity’.

Books, reading, more reading and fucking. ‘Why don’t you read me something you’ve written?’ she asked. It was a bridge too far for me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Never that. It’s all too awful.’ But she insisted, so finally I recited some of the poems in ‘Summer Births’ from memory. And while the words spilled gently from my mouth like little lost souls, Trish fondled me erect and masturbated me –

Trish had always had a thing about India. For her it seemed a magical, mysterious, exotic place. One day she announced she was finally going to go there. She’d saved the money. She was going for six months – longer if she could!

And so she drifted from my life almost as casually as she’d drifted into it. And now she keeps company with the crowd of ghosts occupying this place; a spectre who loves to hear me read out loud late at night –

Hey, Moth, Come Eat the Flame

Diary 19th November

Fact is unstable by its very nature.

#

Visit to T yesterday. We spent Samhain at her enchanting home with its menagerie of dogs, cats and chickens. Trees surrounding the house were finally turning to the russet colours of autumn – and so near the end of November, too. It’s very peaceful here. And T is probably the maddest, but most contained woman I have ever met. She works such incredible magic. She is totally at one with her world and the people in it.

She points to a white feather on the ground beneath a chestnut tree. ‘That,’ she says, her voice gentle but totally sincere, ‘is an angel’s feather. It means good luck to us here today.’

And I feel she really believes this feather is fallen from an angel, not from the back of a near albino chicken clucking about in the undergrowth.

How I envy her the simplicity of her chosen lifestyle…

Two years ago her aunt was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. T concentrated single-mindedly on her aunt’s recovery day-in, day-out, for a period of four months. She said at the time, ‘I don’t know if it’ll do any good. These thing are either meant to be or not. We can only try to intervene. It’s all we can do…’

Her aunt’s doctors at Derriford hospital were astonished when a scan showed the cancer in remission. Within two months the cancer had gone and the aunt had made a full recovery. I cannot explain it, but T is convinced her “magic” worked – as it has done many other times in the past.

#

I have kept notebooks since my twelfth year. During periods of creative sterility, I look back across the years for ‘fresh’ inspiration. Like Dylan Thomas whose mature poems were plagiarised from his much younger self.

What, I wonder, would have been in Shakespeare’s notebook in the years leading up to Macbeth? It take no Oedipus to guess. Cats and toads as familiars to witches, rats without tails that gnaw holes in the bottoms of ships, mariners spell-bound for nine times nine weeks, the vaporous drop on the tip of the moon, plants the roots of which deprive us of reason, air-drawn daggers with gouts of blood, maddened horses that devour each other, charms of all sorts, from the sweltering venom of the toad to grease from a murderer’s gibbet, the strange phenomena of somnambulism, ghost-lore, the behavior of owls. And that is as nothin to the farrago of the notebook which might have preceded Lear!

#

Gillian Rogers was my first love. I remember still her kisses in the recreation ground after school, fiery things they were, that tasted incredibly of aniseed balls and chocolate, the taste of innocent sin…